The Year of the Squeeze: 2025 and the Decline of the American Empire

Written on 11 April 2025.

The Year of the Squeeze: 2025 and the Decline of the American Empire

2025 is starting to look like the year everything becomes clear. Not because things are getting better—but because the fog is lifting. Prices are up, food was just the beginning, and now the tools, tech, and everyday conveniences that once felt like essentials are sliding out of reach. As Professor Richard Wolff and journalist Chris Hedges lay bare in their April 10 interview, the system isn’t correcting—it’s consuming itself.

From the start, Wolff identifies the erratic, improvisational nature of Trump’s second-term economic policies—tariffs, deregulation, and attacks on federal agencies—not as bold reforms, but as the flailing of a dying empire. When leaders no longer know how to govern sustainably, they resort to theatrics. A tariff here, a tax cut there. But none of it addresses the root: decades of debt-fueled decline and a fantasy belief in private-sector salvation.

Wolff stresses what’s often ignored: tariffs are not magic bullets. They are taxes—plain and simple. Their effects are unpredictable and often harmful. The idea that they will bring jobs back or revitalize manufacturing is, at best, wishful thinking. At worst, it’s performative chaos that creates uncertainty for businesses and drives prices even higher for consumers.

Behind all of this, according to Wolff, lies the decay of the post-WWII deal. America emerged from that war unchallenged and built a military-Keynesian empire funded by debt and enforced by political muscle. Now, that advantage is over. BRICS is rising. China has become a real economic competitor. And while U.S. leaders flail, countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are increasingly turning to Beijing, New Delhi, and São Paulo.

Domestically, this means war on the working class. The deregulation push guts essential services. Federal employees are attacked while state and local inefficiencies are ignored. It's not about saving money—it’s about spectacle, about turning bureaucratic dismantling into political theater. But the result is that real people are driven out of stable jobs and into a hyper-competitive private sector where wages are low and inflation is high.

This is why 2025 feels like the tightening grip. Not collapse, yet—but squeeze. The empire hasn’t exploded, it’s just slowly bleeding. You can see it in grocery prices, in Amazon listings, in the absurd cost of a car repair. And for many, the only viable strategy is to live with less. Let the car sit. Stretch the food. Delay everything. Adapt.

And then there’s the military. Wolff and Hedges touch on how sending troops abroad—in Ukraine or elsewhere—might not be about geopolitics so much as economics. War becomes an outlet, a distraction, a pressure valve. A draft might not be imposed from necessity but offered as opportunity for the desperate. A solution to the unspoken question: what do you do with a nation full of economically displaced people?

This is the real story of 2025: not a single catastrophe, but the slow unraveling of empire. A steady exposure of the myths that propped up American dominance. And in that exposure, the population is left to fend for itself—forced to live leaner, think clearer, and maybe, for the first time, see what was coming all along.